The Ingleby Gallery is delighted to announce our first solo exhibition by Roger Ackling.

Like his friends and close colleagues Richard Long and Hamish Fulton, Ackling belongs to the generation of artists who graduated from St Martins School of Art in the 1960's with a sense of the importance of taking art out of the studio and into the everyday world.

For the past 35 years, Ackling has made all of his work by the same extraordinary method: focusing sunlight through a hand held magnifying glass to 'draw' onto pieces of discarded wood or scraps of card which he rescues from the edges of our everyday lives. It is an intense and meditative process; each mark, like a tiny sun, measuring the existence of a ray of light on its passage to earth from a source many millions of miles away.

These burnt traces are etched in lines and grids, each tiny mark building towards a delicate pattern. The resulting works have a weight and strength and sombre stillness which belies their often small scale and everyday origins. They have the power to transform the environment that they inhabit: making quiet interventions that subtly alter the space around them. Through this ritualistic, almost meditative practice Ackling's work quietly presents to the viewer a new way of seeing the world – urging a renewed awareness of the small, the silent, the marginal, the overlooked.

This beautiful exhibition consists of forty works, many of which are tiny sculptural objects no more than 2 inches high. Often incorporating mapping pins or rubber bands, the works are exquisitely grouped and arranged in a unique response to the gallery space.

Roger Ackling has exhibited widely in the UK, Europe, North America and Japan and his work is held in many important collections including the Tate, the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, the Arts Council, the Victoria & Albert Museum, the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam and Tokyo Metropolitan Museum.

The Ingleby Gallery will be exhibiting at the Melbourne Art Fair 2004. Visitors will have the opportunity to see work by the following artists: